Toward a Phenomenology of Scripted Visibility

1. Introduction

I think of these few images as representative of the work I’m doing right now. The images in question— script-saturated scenes of elk, storm-waves, marshland and asemic turbulence—present not illustrations but ontological provocations. They enact a world in which the boundaries between text and landscape dissolve, where script flows into animal presence, and where the visible world emerges from the very illegibility that constitutes its ground.

For me they are attempts to pose these questions:

To begin to answer, I turn to Maurice Merleau-Ponty—whose later ontology of la chair, “the flesh,” provides a framework for understanding how visibility arises from a field of mutual embededness— and to Rainer Maria Rilke, for whom the natural world occupies “the Open,” a realm where beings exist without the self-reflexive closure that typifies human consciousness.

For myself, these images and the others I’m working on are a refusal to present the world as object. Instead, I try to offer a world-writing-itself, a chiasmic intertwining of sense, sign, and flesh.

2. The Phenomenality of Script: Writing as World-Flesh

In Merleau-Ponty’s later thought, the visible is never merely “over there,” nor is the seer an autonomous subject. Perception is an event in the flesh, a reversible fabric in which every act of seeing is also an act of being seen. The world is not external but interfolded with the perceiver; visibility arises as a kind of “shimmering” in between.

I try to make these images manifest this shimmering explicitly:

• I want the elk to emerge not as drawn figures but as brief clarities, edgeless animals rising from the turbulence of script.
• I want the storm-waves to materialize from dense cursive flows that refuse semantic stability.
• The landscapes are not really “depicted” but coalesce through pressure, direction, and texture in the writing itself.

In all cases, script does not “label” the world; script is the world’s visibility—its way of presenting itself as patterned, rhythmic, self-cohering.

This resembles Merleau-Ponty’s idea of l’expression originaire—the “original expression” by which the world articulates itself before conceptual meanings intervene.

Text becomes flesh; flesh becomes text.
Each line of script is a fiber of the visible.

3. Illegibility as the Ground of Form

As Merleau-Ponty reminds us, the world is not first a set of objects; it is a pre-objective field. From this thickness, clarity emerges—contingent, partial, trembling at the edges.

I have wanted my images embody this:

• The elk are legible only because the surrounding script is illegible.
• The stormy weather takes form through zones of density and dissolution.
• “Meaning” becomes a function of contrast, not reference.

This I have wanted to echo Merleau-Ponty’s claim that visibility comes from the fold between presence and absence, legibility and opacity.

In my own images, worlds arise out of conditions of near-reading, where the viewer’s attempt to parse language is constantly frustrated, redirected into pure perceptual involvement.

For me, then, the result is a phenomenological stance:
the viewer experiences perception not as decoding, but as participation.
Seeing becomes an encounter with a world that resists being mastered.

4. The Chiasm: Where Viewer and Image Touch

Merleau-Ponty’s concept of the chiasm—the crossing whereby seer and seen are folded into each other—is something I’ve wanted to enact in my work. It manifests (at least I want it to manifest) in a few ways:

1. The viewer attempts to read the script, but the script refuses. This refusal places the viewer back into their body, into the sensuous thickness of looking.
2. Animal and other forms interrupt the field, not as representations but as emergent knots in the flesh, reminding us that beings are neither wholly available nor wholly withdrawn.
3. The world itself seems to watch, because the refusal of legibility is supposed to give the scene a depth, a hidden life.

I want the viewer to be drawn into the very field of visibility that the image is composed from.
This is Merleau-Ponty’s chiasm:
To see is always to be within the visible, touched by it, altered by it.

5. Rilke’s “Open” and the Animal as Other-World

Here the connection to Rilke is helpful, especially his Eighth Duino Elegy, where he describes animals as dwelling in “the Open” (das Offene):

For the animal, being is infinite;
it sees the Open with all its eyes.

I think of the elk in the first image above as occupying a similar ontological register. They are not aesthetic subjects so much as beings who stand inside the field of script without needing to read it. They do not decode; they inhabit.

Their bodies are not entangled in the hermeneutic struggle of legibility. They exist where language is not interpretive but elemental.

Thus, as I see it, they enact Rilke’s Open: an existence prior to the split between name and named, signifier and signified, mapping and experience. Whereas the human viewer approaches the image seeking meaning, the elk reside within the meaning that precedes meaning—the primal world-flesh.

Sometimes I think my images are a kind of visual Eighth Elegy, in which animals embody a world unbroken by signification, while humans remain outside, striving to enter through the density of script.

6. Asemic Waves and the Infinite Horizon

The wave-image has a slightly different Rilkean resonance. Rilke’s “Open” is not a domain of clarity; it is an infinite horizon in which beings exist without the closure of self-observation. It is akin to Merleau-Ponty’s endlessly deferred visibility, the horizon that recedes with every step.

The storm-waves, composed of script that becomes water, water that becomes text, enact this horizon:

• They are always almost readable, then dissolving.
• They are a field without center, without terminus.
• They embody the infinite unfolding of visibility.

In this sense, the waves as I understand them might actually be the Open itself, not as seen by an animal this time, but as a monstrous, pre-linguistic breath of the world—language before language, sound before sense.

They echo Rilke’s desire:

…not to be turned around,
but to be in the Open, where one’s life continually dissolves…

The waves dissolve themselves continually—into script, into force, into nothingness.

7. Conclusion: Toward a Phenomenology of Script, Flesh, and the Open

So, these asemic landscapes of mine, when read through Merleau-Ponty and entwined with Rilke, reveal, for me anyway:

• a world that writes itself,
• a visibility that emerges from the opacity of sensation,
• animals that dwell in the Open,
• and a viewer who is invited to experience the instability of meaning as the very condition of being-in-the-world.

In these images, I want script to cease to be a human tool and become world-flesh, the very tissue from which perception arises. Form emerges only to dissolve again, just as, for Merleau-Ponty, the world is always pregnant with further possibilities of being seen.

The elk inhabit a literal space in a field beside my house and in their quiet presence, they remind me of Rilke’s lament—that humans have turned themselves away from the Open:

…we, at the very edge of the Open,
are turned toward it,
but never in it.

My visual work does not attempt to “enter the Open” whatever that might even mean. Instead, I’m trying to stage a moment of acknowledgment: the world is always more than we can read, more than we can make sense of, and it is precisely this excess—this illegibility—that constitutes its beauty... and its truth.